It was in the middle of the War that Agatha had first tried her hand at a detective story. In retrospect an important moment, it did not seem significant at the time. For one thing, writing crime fiction was far from being her main preoccupation. The War, Archie’s survival, her mother’s and grandmother’s failing health, the difficulty of keeping up Ashfield and the demands of the dispensary were such serious matters that, by comparison, writing a book was no more than a trivial pastime. Writing was in any case neither a new nor a surprising hobby for Agatha. Clara and Madge had written stories; so had she. For a long time she had been interested in the mysterious and sinister, as she showed in one of her earliest poems, ‘Down in the Wood’, of which the second verse ran:
Bare brown branches against a mad moon
(And Something that stirs in the wood),
Leaves that rustle and rise from the dead,
Branches that beckon and leer in the light
(And Something that walks in the wood).
Skirling and whistling, the leaves are alive!
Driven by Death in a devilish dance!
Shrieking and swaying of terrified trees,
A wind that goes sobbing and shivering by …
And Fear – naked Fear passes out of the wood!
The dispensary, moreover, encouraged thoughts of murder and malpractice, inspiring the poem ‘In a Dispensary’, published in 1924 in The Road of Dreams, (but not reprinted). The potions on its shelves were enough to cause a shiver:
From the Borgias’ time to the present day,
their power has been proved and tried!
Monkshood blue, called Aconite,
and the deadly Cyanide!
Here is sleep and solace and soothing of pain
and courage and vigour new!
Here is menace and murder and sudden death
in these phials of green and blue!
There was more than the contents of the dispensary – and the unnerving habits of the local pharmacist – to incline Agatha to write a murder story. The Victorian and Edwardian press had always relished a mystery and every opportunity was taken to place before the reading public the details of sensational murder trials, with ingenious solutions propounded by special correspondents and lofty summings-up from moralising editors. These were the items Auntie-Grannie liked Agatha to read to her. Agatha herself may not have enjoyed these reports but she was certainly fascinated by problems and puzzles, by aberrant behaviour and the reasons why people departed from normal routine. Perhaps, too, she liked to learn how people kept their secrets hidden, for she herself was secretive. As a child she had been teased about her frosty proclamation, ‘I don’t care for parting with information,’ when asked why she had not reported that a parlourmaid had been seen tasting soup from the tureen before her parents came into dinner. It was the sort of phrase Agatha must have heard from some adult and, although she admitted it was pompous, she was proud of the fact that it stuck. Unlike Madge, who could and would make a good story of anything, Agatha resembled Frederick, who, when asked what he had done with his day, would say ‘Oh, nothing.’ She kept her own counsel and occupied herself with private fantasies. She was interested in techniques and stratagems for keeping secrets safe, in musical patterns and mathematical codes, her aptitude enhanced by practice with puzzle-books, riddles and, eventually, theoretical studies in elementary physics and chemistry.
In her childhood there was plenty of fuel for those who were entertained by mysteries and paradoxes, for the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth saw the publication of an increasing number of ever more ingenious detective stories. As a child Agatha read Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins’s two detective stories, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. With Madge, she had enjoyed Conan Doyle’s early Sherlock Holmes stories, and, at the age of eight, she was fascinated by Madge’s reading aloud of Anna Katharine Green’s detective story, The Leavenworth Case. In 1908, as we have seen, she had been particularly caught by The Mystery of the Yellow Room, a long, melodramatic tale of the attempted murder, by what appeared to be a fiendish supernatural agency, of a beautiful young woman sleeping in a sealed chamber, a heroine who, it emerged, was hiding some dreadful secret. The Mystery of the Yellow Room had a particularly attractive hero, the journalist Joseph Rouletabille, a young man of persistently mysterious origins, whose pursuit of the murderer was the more enthusiastic because he was competing with a disdainful and sinister professional detective, Frederic Larsan, ‘the great Fred’.
It was while they were discussing one of these detective stories that Madge had challenged Agatha to write one herself. This suggestion was at the back of Agatha’s mind when dispensary work began to become monotonous and she decided to try, adopting what was to become her standard practice: beginning by deciding upon the crime and settling on a procedure which made it particularly hard to detect. What she sought was a plot that was simultaneously commonplace and surprising: ‘I could, of course, have a very unusual kind of murder for a very unusual motive, but that did not appeal to me artistically.’ She wanted a riddle: ‘The whole point was that it must be somebody obvious but at the same time, for some reason, you would then find that it was not obvious, that he could not possibly have done it. But really of course he had.’ She next settled on the characters, discovering the difficulty of basing fictional characters on people she knew and breaking the creative log-jam only after seeing some striking people in a tram. It was not so much that they were odd-looking; rather, as with the three people in the Gezirah Hotel who had been the models in Snow Upon the Desert, that their relationship and their behaviour made Agatha begin to speculate.
Next came the question of the detective. She wanted someone like Rouletabille, a detective of a type which had not been used before. She eventually decided that he should be a Belgian refugee; as she recalled in a memorable sentence of her autobiography, Torquay was full of Belgian refugees, bewildered and suspicious, who wanted to be left alone, ‘to save some money, to dig their garden and manure it in their own particular and intimate way’. The detective was to be clever, meticulous, with an impressive name and some knowledge of crime and criminals. Agatha made Hercule Poirot a retired Belgian police officer. Like Larsan, he was in his way an artist, with a high opinion of himself. There have been a number of theories as to Poirot’s origins in Agatha’s imagination. Some have pointed to Hercules Popeau, a former member of the Sûreté in Paris, who had been created well before the War by Mrs Marie Belloc Lowndes, or to Hercule Flambeau, G. K. Chesterton’s criminal-turned-detective. Others have drawn attention to the fictional Eugène Valmont, formerly ‘chief detective of the government of France’, a character of overweening vanity and tolerant, good-natured contempt for the English people and, particularly, the English police. Valmont was the creation of Robert Barr, who published his stories in 1904 and 1905. Another critic, François Rivière, has connected Agatha’s interest in food and cooking with the fact that Poirot’s name is almost the same as the French word for a leek. Towards the end of her life Agatha was asked what she thought of some of these theories. She had only a vague memory of Eugène Valmont and certainly did not recall anything that might have directly influenced her creation. In fact, Poirot was very much her own invention; he was not a Frenchman because she had spent enough time in France for its citizens to be familiar to her, and she wanted something exotic. Belgians, at the time of Poirot’s first manifestation, were the object both of respect (‘gallant little Belgium’, overrun by Germany) and of some condescension, being thought to be neither as intellectual as the French nor as commercially astute as the Dutch. Poirot was clever, and equipped with a pompous character, ridiculous affectations, a luxuriant moustache and a curious egg-shaped head – in contrast to Rouletabille’s bullet-shaped one. His creator could admire him without having to be so deferential that she felt unable to manipulate him. It does not matter whether certain of Poirot’s features were derived, a fragment here, a morsel there, from other works that had contributed to the rich mulch in Agatha’s subconscious; in his extravagance of personality he was sufficiently plausible to stand and survive by himself.
Agatha worked on and off at her story, writing it out in longhand and, as each chapter was done, typing it on Madge’s old machine. She was distracted by it but, at the half-way point, became tired and cross at wrestling with the exposition of her plot. Clara then suggested that she should take it away to finish during her fortnight’s holiday, so The Mysterious Affair at Styles was largely completed at the Moorland Hotel at Haytor on Dartmoor. Agatha wrote all morning, walking over the moor to think out the next part of the book in the afternoon. Then she dined, slept for twelve hours, and set to work again the following morning. With a dozen of these concentrated bursts the back of her work was broken; she brought the draft home, tinkered with it – adding ‘love interest’ on the model of popular detective novels – and sent it away to be professionally typed. It went first to Hodder and Stoughton, came back, went elsewhere, was returned, was sent to Methuen, came back once more, and, last, was despatched to John Lane at The Bodley Head, where it appeared to sink without trace.
Agatha quickly forgot about it. Archie came to work at the Air Ministry in London, her real married life began, the War ended, and she found herself expecting a baby. Though astonished at the discovery, she was thrilled. ‘My ideas of having a baby had been that they were things that were practically automatic. After each of Archie’s leaves I had been deeply disappointed to find that no signs of a baby appeared. This time I had not even expected it.’ She consulted a sensible doctor in Torquay, unhappily named Dr Stabb (his colleagues were Dr Carver and Dr Quick), and, although she suffered nine months of morning sickness, on August 5th the baby was born with little trouble. Agatha’s daughter was called Rosalind Margaret Clarissa; she was born at Ashfield.
Agatha was still deeply attached to Ashfield. It was near the sea, it had trees, many of the belongings she had grown up with were there, and at its centre was Clara. Few of Agatha’s friends were in London and she and Archie were not sufficiently well off to entertain very much or to amuse themselves with more than an occasional supper in town or visit to a dance hall. In Torquay, however, things were easier. Ashfield was large and, though some of Agatha’s contemporaries, now married, lived rather grandly, there were still enough cheerful young people to enjoy a picnic on the moors or an impromptu party. On one occasion, for instance, Agatha gave a ‘Poodle Party’ at Ashfield, which all the guests attended dressed as dogs; a concession was made in Clara’s case and she was allowed to come as a butterfly. Agatha wore a headdress of astrakhan and Archie’s dinner jacket. She had cut a hole in the trousers and inserted the spring from a Captive Pencil (the sort held by a spring so that it would bend for use but bounce back when released), having substituted a pom-pom for the pencil itself.
What did Archie make of these proceedings? As his letters show, he had been a gay and light-hearted young man, and he was to amuse his daughter and later her school-friends with jokes, games and wonderful presents. But he also succumbed easily to anxiety. Agatha spoke of his unemotional manner but to some extent that may have been a mask. Archie could be edgy, his sinus gave him trouble and his digestion was delicate: there were many evenings, Agatha wrote, when he came home from a taxing day at the Air Ministry unable to eat, until, after some hours groaning on the bed, he would suddenly say, to Agatha’s constant amazement, that he felt like trying something with treacle or golden syrup. Archie had fought courageously in the War – the repeated acts of bravery that had brought him his medals and so many mentions in despatches also suggest quick reactions and finely tuned sensitivity to the needs of the moment – and it had been a long, depressing, noisy, filthy campaign, whose effects he had tried to conquer while on his leaves by being frivolous, but which had still left him grave and serious. He had been obliged to grow up too fast. Like a schoolboy, he demanded the smooth, sweet viscosity of golden syrup to comfort his nervous stomach and, with a sudden infusion of sugar, refuel his slender, exhausted frame.
Not that Agatha overlooked this. She understood Archie and was later to describe in her books the sort of difficulty that men of his age and temperament found when they returned to everyday life after an heroic war. In many ways – as that unexpected pregnancy shows – she was able to settle down more quickly to changed conditions and a new pace. After a fortnight with the newly born Rosalind at Ashfield, she returned to London to secure the services of a nurse and a maid of all work, and to find furnished accommodation in which they could live while she looked for an unfurnished flat they could decorate and arrange themselves. With much expenditure of time, energy and emotion, all this was accomplished.
Archie had left the Air Force at the end of the War, determined to go into the City to make some money. It was not too difficult to find an opening, since City firms, whose usual recruits had gone from school to the battlefield, there to be wiped out in swathes, were naturally anxious to offer posts to brave and enthusiastic young officers. This did not mean, however, that Archie earned a large salary; his first job brought him £500 a year, which, with his gratuity and savings giving another £100 a year, and Agatha’s £100 annual income from her grandfather’s trust, was just enough. Rent and the price of food had risen enormously compared with costs before the War but to employ a nurse and cook/housemaid was not considered a luxury. Owning a motor car, however, would have been an immense extravagance.
Nonetheless, Agatha was perfectly happy. By a stroke of luck, she heard of an unfurnished flat, No. 96, in the same building – Addison Mansions – as the furnished one, No. 25, in which they were perching, and its ordering and decoration gave her a great deal of pleasure. She always enjoyed acquiring and embellishing houses; this time she and Archie papered and tiled the bathroom in scarlet and white, with the help of a painter and decorator. With a friend from the Air Force and his sister, they painted the walls of the sitting-room shiny pale pink and, to the professional decorator’s eventual grudging approval, covered the ceiling with black glossy paper decorated with hawthorn blossoms. Rosalind’s nursery was washed with pale yellow paint, with an animal frieze around the top of the wall. The curtains were made elsewhere but Agatha bravely assembled loose covers for the furniture, though, she remembered, she ‘did not attempt to do any piping’. She kept careful records of the furnishing and decorating expenses, some of which were assigned to her and some to Archie’s account. Archie, for instance, bought Rosalind’s frieze and a bed from Maples, Agatha a mattress and a mincing machine. The installation of a telephone (£4) was put down to Archie and purple quilts to a general housekeeping account. There was no piano, another reason why Ashfield remained important.
1919 was a good year for Agatha. She had found and was furnishing a pretty flat, she enjoyed her interesting and equably tempered daughter, delighted in her husband and got on well with her servants. She was young and attractive and her family’s health was good; she was not greatly worried about bills. Her spirits became even more buoyant with the next welcome surprise: just before she and Archie moved into the new flat, John Lane asked her to come to discuss the typescript of The Mysterious Affair at Styles which had been sent to The Bodley Head two years before. It was a moment of great significance in Agatha’s life and her recollection of it is like a scene on the stage or in a picture. Indeed, she describes John Lane, ‘a small man with a white beard’, sitting behind a desk in a room full of pictures, looking Elizabethan, as if he should have been a portrait himself, with a ruff around his neck. Her memory has framed that encounter between the young amateur author and the shrewd professional publisher. At the time Agatha was delighted with the outcome. John Lane liked her book, though he suggested various minor alterations and a major change in the ending. He would publish it, and would give her a ten per cent royalty on any English sales over two thousand copies and on American sales exceeding one thousand copies, together with half of anything the book earned from serial or dramatic rights. The Bodley Head was to have an option, at only a slightly increased rate of royalty, on her next five books. In later years, when Agatha knew her work was popular and her name valuable, she would feel that John Lane had taken advantage of her inexperience – as indeed he had.
The relationship between writer and publisher is studded with traps but at this first meeting, matters were relatively simple. John Lane drove a hard bargain with an untried author, who was overjoyed at the thought of her book’s being published and who had not contemplated this as a way of earning money. She agreed to alter the last chapter, changing it from a court scene to a conversation in the library between Poirot and Hastings, his amanuensis and well-meaning but blundering colleague, and she modestly celebrated her success with Archie. The serial rights of The Mysterious Affair at Styles were sold to the Weekly Times for £50, of which Agatha received half, and the volume was published in America in 1920 and in England, at seven and sixpence, in 1921. Agatha dedicated it to Clara.
Soon after Rosalind’s birth in 1919, Auntie-Grannie had died at the age of ninety-two, of heart failure after an attack of bronchitis. With her death went part of the income salvaged from the wreck of H. B. Chaflin, and Ashfield accordingly became even more difficult for Agatha, Clara and Madge to keep up. Archie first proposed that Ashfield be sold, to enable Clara to live more economically and conveniently, but, when Agatha vigorously protested that the idea was unthinkable, he suggested that she should write another book. Although she did not believe she would earn much money this way, she did draw some encouragement from Archie’s remarks, which seemed to indicate that (like Dermot in Unfinished Portrait) he did not wholly disapprove of his wife’s literary efforts.
Agatha next produced a thriller. Its catalyst was a discussion overheard in an ABC teashop, in which the name ‘Jane Fish’ struck Agatha as particularly odd and interesting. Jane Finn, as she became, is an elusive figure, who has been entrusted in the middle of the War with the delivery of certain important documents, which various individuals and factions are attempting to obtain. The hero and heroine of the novel are a pair of ‘young adventurers’ (one of the titles Agatha originally tried), unemployed after leaving the Forces, ingenious, affectionate, unsophisticated and irrepressible and, particularly in the case of the girl, arch to the point of being irritating. The novel is especially interesting, however, not so much because it introduces Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, but for the first appearance of two important themes that were to figure in much of Agatha’s work: the search for the mysterious possessor of some valuable secret or special knowledge – who may be a courier, a conspirator, the perpetrator of a crime, and who is as likely to be a woman as a man – and the identification of some powerful figure, able to buy unlimited information and arms, to travel anywhere and influence anyone, bent on domination. Sometimes, as in the story of the pursuit of Jane Finn by the ‘man behind the Bolshevists’, the two characters are opposed; in other books they are one and the same. The person who seeks to dominate is, without exception, evil at worst or of deplorable character at best; the possessor of secrets, on the other hand, may be either a sinister presence, an innocent pawn, or, as in the case where it is a detective with insight and experience, a force for good.
John Lane accepted The Secret Adversary, as Agatha eventually called her second novel, for publication in 1922. It earned her £50, although what proportion of this came from the sale of serial rights and what from an advance on royalties is unclear from the ambiguous sentence in her draft Autobiography. More encouraging than cheques from John Lane and the Weekly Times was the praise she received from Bruce Ingram, editor of the Sketch, who commissioned her to write a series of Poirot stories for his paper. She began to compose these in 1921, together with another full-length detective novel, Murder on the Links, which was based on her recollection of a complicated case of murder that had happened in France not long before and on a number of French detective stories she had been reading. At this point, however, there were two interruptions.
The first was the prospect of the return to England of Agatha’s brother Monty, who had been living in a precarious, harum-scarum way in various parts of the Empire. After Frederick’s death in 1901 he had come home on leave and had then gone back to his Regiment in India, where, having come of age and into his inheritance under Nathaniel’s will, he proceeded to enjoy his legacy. It was quickly exhausted. Monty seems to have resigned his commission when his debts became too embarrassing and, unable to settle down, to have taken himself to Kenya to try his hand at farming, where, however, he neglected the tract of land he was granted, preferring to spend his time hunting elephants and other game. Apart from sending his mother and sisters lavish presents of silks and embroidery on his departure from India, and occasional telegrams requesting the urgent despatch of funds to Africa, Monty communicated rarely with his family. At the end of 1910 they endeavoured to trace him and learnt that he had moved to Uganda, where he was ‘enormously popular’ and frequently destitute. In 1911 he conceived a brilliant scheme for running small cargo boats on Lake Victoria. He sent Madge letters of support from enthusiastic friends and appealed to her to stake him. Thinking that at last a career for Monty had been found, Madge wired him his fare to England, and did what she could to help him finance the building of the first boat, the Batenga, in a boatyard in Essex. Monty threw himself into the project with alarming keenness: the Batenga was fitted with teak, ebony and ivory, special fireproof china and engraved wine glasses were designed, and a captain’s uniform for Monty ordered from the tailor. Between visits to supervise progress on the boat’s construction Monty would come to London and stay in an expensive hotel in Jermyn Street, lavishing treats upon himself – sets of silk pyjamas, a bonsai tree, and the like – and upon his family – a sapphire bracelet for Madge, and a petit point evening bag, acquired, of course, with the money she had put up in the first place. His family despaired of the Batenga’s ever being completed, let alone its arriving on Lake Victoria.
The venture might have succeeded but war broke out just as the boat was to be shipped to Africa, and it was sold for a song to the Government. Monty returned to the Army and enlisted in the King’s African Rifles. He was known to his fellow officers as ‘Puffing Billy’ and, years later, Agatha heard from one of them about his exploits in the War. Monty had nearly been court-martialled for insisting that his convoy of mules halt at a spot which he declared a perfect place for battle with the Germans. His commanding officer disagreed and was protesting against Monty’s insubordination when a large force of Germans actually arrived, was engaged and decisively defeated in what became known as ‘Miller’s Battle’. There was no court-martial. Monty was wounded in the arm during the African campaign and was later transported to hospital, with great difficulty, since he repeatedly climbed out of the ambulance train; according to the Colonel, who told Agatha about him, ‘Every time they put him in one side he got out of the other.…’ He escaped from the hospital after three days and, though frail, eventually resumed his rough and tumble existence: ‘mad as a hatter,’ said Agatha’s informant. Now, four years after the end of the War, Monty was coming home and preparations would have to be made for his reception. It seemed, however, that Agatha would not be there to welcome him, for the other interruption to the smooth course of her life with Archie and Rosalind was a scheme that would take her out of England: a tour of the Empire, lasting an entire year.